THE MEG - Official Trailer #1 [HD]

[tech_diver]

I'm into Sci-fi so I would give the storyline some slack for poetic licence. However, it's a slippery slope down to Sharknado 3.

 

[Nick Steele]

Comparing it to Deep Blue Sea is setting the bar ridiculously low.

Can you point me towards a better shark movie since jaws besides deep blue sea?

Thanks for the spoilers btw.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Can you point me towards a better shark movie since jaws besides deep blue sea?

Thanks for the spoilers btw.

Well, it has been 15-20 years since I last read Meg, so my memory might be a little off. I will say that on the plus side the trailer seems to diverge notably from the book and play it a bit more for laughs, so I'd expect it to be an improvement (that was my opinion on Jaws as well - the original novel was kind of a kludge; the movie stripped it down to a town versus a shark without adultery, class warfare, and organized crime subplots thrown in).

As for a better shark movie, I'm hard-pressed to give an example. Part of the charm of Jaws was that with how clunky "Bruce" the mechanical shark was, they had to use it very sparingly until late in the movie and it actually worked out in the film's advantage. All the followers have been able to skip that limitation and generally speaking follow the script of "let's throw some people and boats in the water with big sharks, watch things get wrecked, and then kill the sharks." Personally, I'd love something that shows a little ingenuity and has the sharks as something other than a stock killing machine that could for all intents and purposes be replaced with a giant squid, an alien, a serial killer, or the Terminator and not really change the basic plot.

The only films that really pop into mind are some of the better documentaries like Blue Water, White Death. I've yet to watch the movie, but Benchley's follow-up novel The Deep manages to present sharks as a hazard without making them malevolent. And while I can't really see it being made into a movie, Benchley's The Girl of the Sea of Cortez is hands-down the best novel about the ocean I've ever read; it's the crown jewel of my personal library and I valued it to the point where I picked up a backup copy.

 

[Nick Steele]

@HalcyonDaze very true movies now don’t really have much limitations and that can hurt them with crazy ideas. Also I think a lot of it has to do with what a majority of the population wants (money). A movie about misunderstood sharks and how they aren’t that terrifying/dangerous wouldn’t make as much money as the movie we see now.

I for one love sharks and welcome them any time I’m in/around water. I’ve had both friendly and scary incounters with sharks but nothing I wasn’t expecting/prepared for. One of my bucket list items is to freedive/scuba with a great white outside of a cage.

I’ll have to pick up a copy of The Girl of the Sea of Cortez. I’m sure most of my friends and family will be shocked I’m reading (haven’t since high school lol).

 

[HalcyonDaze]

@HalcyonDaze very true movies now don’t really have much limitations and that can hurt them with crazy ideas. Also I think a lot of it has to do with what a majority of the population wants (money). A movie about misunderstood sharks and how they aren’t that terrifying/dangerous wouldn’t make as much money as the movie we see now.

I for one love sharks and welcome them any time I’m in/around water. I’ve had both friendly and scary incounters with sharks but nothing I wasn’t expecting/prepared for. One of my bucket list items is to freedive/scuba with a great white outside of a cage.

I’ll have to pick up a copy of The Girl of the Sea of Cortez. I’m sure most of my friends and family will be shocked I’m reading (haven’t since high school lol).

The Girl of the Sea of Cortez is hard to find as it was out of print for a while, although about four years ago I was pleasantly surprised to find it on Amazon while Christmas shopping for a friend. It's essentially Benchley's anti-Jaws novel; he wrote it after a filming trip with Stan Waterman and Howard Hall to the Sea of Cortez. There is one menacing shark encounter that the titular protagonist manages to resolve with her own wits; otherwise there are more placid encounters with a whale shark and hammerheads (the latter is used to deliver an interesting coming-of-age lesson) and the star of the book is a manta ray based on an individual encountered by the film crew.

I suppose one of my other complaints about Meg is that in hindsight, it's pretty ludicrous that a 60-ft shark is going to go through the effort of sucking down humans. A bus-sized animal that eats whales and requires a lot of calories is probably going to be about as interested in eating humans as the tiger sharks I've seen are in eating the clouds of grunts at our feeding sites - i.e., not much.

 

[CuzzA]

Well, if your intention is to sell movie tickets and eventually DVD's to the masses of mostly ignorant humans, it would probably be wise to have megalodon eating humans rather than whales. Just sayin.

 

[HalcyonDaze]

Well, if your intention is to sell movie tickets and eventually DVD's to the masses of mostly ignorant humans, it would probably be wise to have megalodon eating humans rather than whales. Just sayin.

Pretty much. It's like in the movie The Shallows where a big white shark totally ignores a whale carcass to go after Blake Lively and some surfers. In reality the white shark would probably gorge itself into a stupor on the whale and not give a damn about the surfers.

 

[RockiesFan]

Don't forget 47 Metres Down.

 

[CuzzA]

Don't forget 47 Metres Down.

Apples and oranges. Megalodon in this movie is the equivalent to Godzilla or King Kong. 47 Meters Down seemed like they were trying to frame the story as practical, yet broke simple laws of diving physics.

You guys seem too negative, IMO. Hell, the movie hasn't even been released yet.

 

[RockiesFan]

I like the premise of Meg, it was a fun book and so much could be done with the story sans all the campy stuff.